Animation with substance. The crowd funds it, the crowd owns it. Tube is the experimental production of a 3D animated short about the dream and failure and achievement of immortality. It's also a love
letter to free software and open culture that marks their convergence with independent filmmaking.

Your support will enable us to finish a movie in which a passionate volunteer team has invested years of hard labor.

WHAT IS THIS MOVIE YOU SPEAK OF

A SHORT TIME BACK I DISCOVERED AMONG THE ASSYRIAN TABLETS IN THE BRITISH MUSEUM AN ACCOUNT OF THE FLOOD

- The Chaldean Account of the Deluge, George Smith. 1872

The Tube Open Movie is inspired by the Gilgamesh poem, which comes down to us as an incomplete, conflicting set of fragments and variations, the clay tablet remnants of more than a few ruined libraries.
The epic centers on the Sumerian king who ruled Uruk, in ancient
Iraq, who for his tyranny the gods teach friendship and loss, and
through them, the fear of his own death. In the
end, the immortality he achieves is different to the one he first seeks.
Nearly five thousand years later, Gilgamesh, a woman and a soldier, rushes into
a station in pursuit of a fragment of paper blown about by the passing
of trains. In an ever-accelerating vortex, her hero's progress becomes
the animation's own frames.

Elephants Dream, the original open movie directed by Bassam Kurdali, proved it possible to make high quality 3D animated films using free, libre tools in a studio setting. The Tube project is a new experiment in distributed collaboration. From an undisclosed
base in New England, it unites a team of local and international
artists using cutting-edge tools for independent filmmaking
based in - what else - the hypertubes.

PATRONS, YOUR PSEUDO-CELLULOID NEEDS YOU

As a frame of reference, Elephants Dream cost €100,000 to produce; Sintel more recently, €400,000 -- or $550,000. We got to this point in our experiment by placing Tube in a teaching context, and through the participation of a lot of talented people who have worked so far for next to nothing, but also need to eat. In the course of making Tube we are developing useful tools, and we would like to release the movie with its impressive data assets before they obsolesce! Our aim is to prove the open movie model as a viable way to create independent animation. So, in order to finish production in the next 7 months, we ask for your support.

We have set our 30 day Kickstarter goal to a conservative sum that can maintain momentum by going quickly into work already in production. It will fund key artists from our team, and potentially some new hires. If community patronage can exceed that target, it will ensure that we are able to work better and faster, and help us establish the open movie as a model we and others can continue to use.

If you would like to make a tax-deductible contribution please contact us; we also have fiscal sponsorship.

URCHN is an
animation group developing an internet-based production
pipeline rooted in free/libre tools. It is perhaps the first studio of
allied artists outside the Blender software’s own Institute to take
up the experiment of producing ambitious and costly computer animated
films with content and data CC
licensed to the public. Using a business model that invests in commonwealth,
and which feeds directly into education, our goal is to explore the
versatile medium of animation independent of typical commercial
pressures that restrict it to genre. Enhancements we develop to the
free/libre software toolset support the proliferation of varied creative works. At the same time, our
participatory media encourage literacy in the underlying tools and
systems that aid or impede expression, to influence how we assemble
not only in culture, but as a global society.

URCHN is affiliated with the Bit
Films incubator of Hampshire
College, where students and graduate artists work alongside professionals to develop their skills, their reels, and gain screen credit in animated filmmaking. We open internships to application each summer, fall and spring.

LAST WORDS FOUND IN A BATHTUB

Bassam
had hardly discovered the very cool 3D software Blender, then
available as freeware, when in 2002 its parent company NaN announced
bankruptcy. Despondent at the threat of its demise, users rallied
to the news that Blender's primary author, Ton Roosendaal, had
brokered a plan with creditors to free the source code under the GNU
General Public License, for the sum of €100,000. In a few short
weeks the community achieved the target of the Free Blender Fund, and
the libre Blender CG suite -- modeller, animator, video editor, compositor, renderer and
game engine -- was born.

Computer
animation is today's cathedral,
an overarching art that collects disparate forms (programming, architecture, sculpture, painting, music, literature), and which collectively they advance. In 2005 work
began
on the first
'open movie' -- Elephants
Dream. Another
early example of crowdfunding, the
short was
conceived in
part to demonstrate the contested viability of libre tools in a
production environment. It not only saw a dramatic
real-time
overhaul to the
Blender
software, but
captured a
wide audience and galvanized
the entire ecology of
libre
tools and culture: its
influence was
recognized from
CG festivals
to financial
newspapers to
the Museum of Modern Art. The success of the project enabled the Blender Foundation to set up a permanent Institute, with further productions organized to drive software development and showcase its capabilities.

Open
tools have become an important global resource. While One Laptop Per
Child brings the wealth of open computing to little-developed areas,
comparatively affluent countries where PC infrastructure (hardware +
connectivity) already exists lag in adoption. Developed countries
promote increasingly restrictive and monopolistic standards
that
impoverish social discourse and capital. Copyright
and Patent,
meant to feed inventors, but also experiment and the public domain,
are today used in defense of a regressively feudal system from which
neither cultural nor economic benefit can easily flow. Lofted by the
most powerful elements of industry, such developments also lay the
groundwork of a control society: important historical films cannot be
shown because of permissions issues; Ian McEwan is charged with
plagiarism for citing a WWII memoir -- or, referencing collective
memory; and in the United States, we
use uninspected
election software to
institute government
if
it has
been judged "Intellectual Property". URCHN implicitly
critiques the role of IP in formulating the terms/structures of
public discourse – because Property as applied to Speech creates
vacancies in memory; its fantasy is criminalization and control.
Perversely,
it may be that no quarter has done more than the entertainment
industry to promote dystopian technology (e.g. DRM, DMCA, ACTA,
SOPA, PIPA). Now,
in
this moment,
copyright has
metastasized to threaten not
just the
cultural
economy,
but
the
internet we
live on. There
is no copyright policy, only Internet policy; there is no Internet
policy, only policy.

Reformulating
Biko's observation that the most powerful tool in the hands of the
oppressor is the mind of the oppressed in market terms gives us the
problem known as 'mind-share'. A populace conditioned by unregulated
industry will be slow to notice the freedoms it is losing, or to be
aware of rich alternatives even when they are almost under its nose.
Open tools and licensing standards have ripened; Fedora and Ubuntu
Linux have made it easy; peer-to-peer networking (e.g. BitTorrent) is
positioned among the vital organs of grassroots media. But a fork is
in place between the collaborative and competitive systems: closed
tools are standard, perceived to be king. For students and
professionals, working outside that standard can be fatally
babelizing. For this reason, interest in open media far exceeds its present ecology.

Purely
synthetic, 3D
animation has a remarkable expressive capacity, and by its uniquely modular
nature holds the potential to grow a public archive of reusable data. The
medium is also labor intensive. The
challenge animators face, the challenge
we are all trying to solve, is of how to fund the expensive work of
really interesting independent animation. Despite numerous successes
of permissive distribution
in a variety of media in recent years,
there is no other CG studio outside the
Blender
Institute
yet
founded on the open model. URCHN
wants to see the commons as fertile terrain, and
not
a marginal zone beside which the real business of culture
transpires. With the Tube project, our central experiment is to produce high value, radically open work, assuming
the principle that what you feed into the global commons will inspire the
commons to feed you.

When
the medium and means of production is digital, we don't need to
endlessly mimic economic behaviors derived from material scarcity.
Instead, we can respond to the condition of digital reproducibility in pursuit of a new mode of production. Promoting
a libre toolset, URCHN offers the full data of its filmmaking
pipeline -- usually a closely guarded asset -- and
invites
the audience to take apart our work to advance its own.

We continue
the trend begun by the Blender
Foundation: demonstrating
a model of independent
production
that invests
in
commonwealth, URCHN seeks to engender
a new industry of participatory media. Tube will be released in formats from handheld to High-Definition; without closing off traditional distribution avenues, its licensing status as an open movie is also its passport to new ones. In
a popular medium, when allowed to roam at will,
such animation
acts as a wide ambassador for free/libre tools and culture.

FAQ

Tube will use the Creative Commons Attribution Share-alike (CC BY-SA) for most content; some assets we might license as CC BY, and all code (software, Python scripts) we produce will use GPL v2 or later. Software and assets that we do not produce ourselves will be under their own respective license, but we will only use freely licensed software (as defined by the Free Software Foundation) and free culture licensed art (usually Creative Commons) as defined by freedomdefined.org, to keep the project as accessible as possible.

Rewards

Pledge $1 or more

145 backers
All gone!

The Tube Open Movie and data assets under CC license for learning, remixing, and reuse

Estimated delivery:Feb 2013

You selected

Pledge $1 or more

110 backers

As an Open Movie under CC license, Tube, its tools and its data are the root reward because they will be free to all. Your donation to this expensive work invests in the commonwealth and supports the access of everyone.

Estimated delivery:Feb 2013

You selected

Pledge $10 or more

206 backers

All of the above + A download of poster art from Tube for printing or your device

Estimated delivery:Jun 2012

You selected

Pledge $25 or more

72 backers

All of the above + The specific animation frame that YOU help us create. A movie is a stream of individual images: we will email you the piece of the film that you made possible. You can print it, burn it, paint on it, sleep with it, make an origami, send us your graffiti…

Estimated delivery:Dec 2012

You selected

Pledge $35 or more

164 backers

All of the above + Get the movie and data DVD on release, and early access to production files while the film is in festivals

Estimated delivery:Feb 2013

You selected

Pledge $50 or more

226 backers

All of the above + Your name in the film credits as a patron

Estimated delivery:Feb 2013

You selected

Pledge $100 or more

21 backers

All of the above + Invitation to the crew's web premier and livestream party

Estimated delivery:Dec 2012

You selected

Pledge $250 or more

16 backers

All of the above + A 3D printed model of Gilgamesh!

Estimated delivery:Nov 2012

You selected

Pledge $500 or more

3 backers

All of the above + Special Thanks acknowledgement for your patronage

Estimated delivery:Feb 2013

You selected

Pledge $2,000 or more

2 backers

All of the above + Become an Executive Producer. Alternatively, if you promote Tube and send us the names of donors you referred whose contributions reach 2K or more, you also earn an Executive Producer credit!

Estimated delivery:May 2012

You selected

Pledge $5,000 or more

1 backer
All gone!

All of the above + From your photo we will create a character and immortalize your own fabulous self (or whom you choose) in a memorable cameo role. *Natural persons only*

Estimated delivery:Feb 2013

Funding period

Apr 16, 2012 - May 16, 2012
(30 days)

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